Friday, March 4, 2016

Cloudy Skies Over Venice

It's been a topsy turvy Friday morning in my corner of the house. I had wanted to finish the Venice page from the book Street Traveling by Jeongjiwon before lunch so I started dabbling in it before my husband, Marvin, and I even had breakfast.

Two hours later, with two buildings left to color on the left side of the spread I took a break and mindlessly flipped through the posts of the coloristas at the Coloring Book for Adults Philippines group page. I then came across Ian's video clips on blending. 'Wow, sipag, galing ni Ian!' I thought. Then came the inspiration to shoot a short video clip of the remaining water part I was about to color using Inktense pencils and paint brush.

So I hurriedly fixed my tripod and selfie stick and lodged the phone on the clamp, rather routine when I take videos of works in progress.

Now here's the thing, I never took note of the proper orientation of the phone when taking videos. So, when the shot video appeared sideways on my phone screen I knew the project was going to take more time than I intended.

To cut the long story short I uploaded the 'sideways' video but apologized to everyone who would be viewing it (or would be turned off from viewing it) since I knew there was no way I could reorient it from my phone, laptop, or any other device I had.

Good thing my friend Eli Lorenzo saw it and came to the rescue. She downloaded the video using this app:

Since I was bent on using only Inktense watercolor pencils on this picture I went along and shaded the sky area with very light lines at first. But then I had instead this brilliant (rather moronic, really) idea of scratching the tip of the pencil against sandpaper and letting the dust fall loosely on the page. Next, with my wet brush in hand and much bravado I swooshed the pigments around on that small part of the page leaving a big blue blot that I could not lift even after adding more water. That's Inktense for you.

Anyhow, I didn't want to blame myself immediately after and just thought it could still be rectified later on. The only thing left to do then was to just continue laying the blue the same way until the entire sky was done.

When I was finished I studied the image I had created of the sky and started to notice that the uneven coloring could pass off as cumulonimbus clouds! It was a speck of light in the end of the tunnel, not exactly a eureka moment because I wasn't entirely sure it would work, but I had no other choice, I had to take it. I went in with the Aquamarine Inktense pencil and sketched tiny lines here and there until, voila! the clouds looked like it was deliberately done.